Bleeker Hill

by Russell Mardell

  The office was small and cramped, the walls lined with intersected shelves piled high with large dusty tomes and dog-eared folders. A small corner desk to his left held a chaotic field of paper and a cluster of photos in frames. He could see Schaeffer staring back from some, a tall, dark haired woman in several others, and a slight, smiling girl in all. The sheer joyful normality that emanated from each trapped image held no place in this building and it threw Sullivan off balance. He held one of the photos close to him, turning it to the meagre light, looking wistfully at the young girl that stared back, and at once – with the same sheer heart-tearing predictability it always came with – he was seeing nothing but his daughter.

  Sullivan replaced the photo and the memory and turned to the shelves, thumbing the spines of the books, and flipping over the covers of various folders. The books felt as dry and heavy as the air around him. He pulled a couple of medical journals from the shelves, casting a confused eye over words he didn’t understand, and then discarding them to the table in a small cloud of dust. More books were dragged out and dumped to the table, cursory glances showed words and phrases he had heard of but had no care to rediscover; electroconvulsive, anger, suppression, retrograde, amnesia, hypnosis, therapy…there were books on dream interpretations, brain function and hallucinogens, papers and case studies, so much information, so many facts and figures, and each one started to feel like different edges to the same picture. He looked back to the chair in the other room and felt a lump swell in his throat. “Memories are all we’ve got,” he could hear Mia saying to him. “As long as we’ve got them then this doesn’t have to be a reality. Not if we’ve got memories.” How many? How many had there been? He pulled a case study file from the desk and it seemed to perish in his hands, papers and photos spilling from its useless skin and on to the floor. He bent down and gathered up the photos, his eyes stinging at each nameless face he took in, each in varying stages of whatever collective horror had been taking place here. From the photos in his hand he turned back to the photos on the table, Schaeffer and the tall woman and the smiling girl. How much time and space separated what he held and what he saw?

  ‘What the hell happened to us?’ He found himself asking the air around him. As if in response to his question a book fell from a shelf, and with it the shelf seemed to tilt and rock and tip over. A small shower of papers and files landed on him, breaking open around him, spilling their secrets before him. His hands went to the ground, pushing through photos and papers, moving them to the side, searching out something else, searching for…

  It was a small, grey Dictaphone sat on its end under the corner table. His hands shot to it and pulled it out across the floor and into his lap. His fingers played along the buttons. He popped it open and saw a tape inside, and then pushed it shut and thumbed the rewind button. It was Schaeffer’s voice that came to him when finally he played back the tape, lost and lonely, from another world, just out of reach.

  BH13 fascinates and repels. I feel torn between wanting to study him and being terrified of even being in the same room. The things the other workers would say about him and I never listened. My work consumed me. I cared only for what I was creating. I was blind to him. It is only now that he chooses to make the truth unavoidable that I can see him for what he is. We shouldn’t be here. He keeps saying we shouldn’t be here. Yet somehow our arrival seems unavoidable. Preordained. This place must be buried. It is not a place for life. I question the life now within him. It is no longer a soul but a force. It is a vessel for the dead. He wants to be heard but I am fearful that if he is he will then kill us all.

  A pause. Laughter. The lighting of a cigarette and the slow deliberate exhales of the smoke. Somewhere in the background, music is playing. The recording clicks off. Silence. A few moments later a different sounding Schaeffer returns. Distracted. Nervous.

  It is my belief that BH13 is somehow feeding on the energy here. Somehow, in ways I am not qualified to even try and explain, he is tethered to this shelter. He was always meant to be here. Maybe, in some way, we all were. It was BH13’s fate that he should end up here. Maybe we all share that same fate. This place seems to need him. It calls to him. It judges him. It judges us all. Was that not what always happened here? Can the dead not judge as well as the living? Whether BH13’s gift is genuine or just an elaborate ruse to play up to a persona, I cannot say, but I catch him on the odd moments talking to himself, turning to some unseen person next to him and opening a full and frank exchange. It is a deeply unnerving thing to witness. What does he see? Is it just a con? The story of this area is well documented, so I have no need to doubt that BH13 would be as fully versed in its dark history as most others. Though if it is a con, he’s the greatest I have ever seen.

  I have so much I want to ask him yet I find myself increasingly frightened to approach. He is displaying occasional bouts of uncontrollable rage at the other workers and for the most part he works alone. I have assigned him to the chamber, deep below at the core of this terrible place. He looks as if he is not sleeping and has hardly eaten much over the last few days. He is distracted and distant. My instinct is that he should be removed immediately for both his own good and that of his fellow workers, and yet I can’t bring myself to seek approval for it. He is grotesquely fascinating. I think he is the only person who truly understands this place. What price knowledge?

  Click off. Silence. Click on. Whispered voice.

  An extraordinary and troubling night. I worked late preparing to receive the next batch of test subjects for the Wash and was returning to my room gone midnight. Something drew me to the workers sleeping quarters, a sixth sense, a notion, a vision; I don’t know what I should call it. Something. There was something there. I took the slightly longer route back so as to pass where they slept and it was with little surprise that upon arriving I found BH13 to be the only one awake. More than that though, he was sat up in bed and staring out across the room. He looked so pale. So very haunted. He was rocking back and forth in bed, his arms tight around his chest. A catatonic state for want of a better description, yet a description that does not do it justice. He seemed…consumed. He was fixed at a point before him, his eyes unflinching, widening, he glowed in the darkness like a diamond in the deepest mine. Then, as if struck, he fell back on to the bed and seemed to be choking, his hands went to his throat, scrabbling for purchase on something that wasn’t there, long fingers trying to prise something from him, gripping, tugging, and digging into his flesh. I stood watching. I couldn’t move, couldn’t step forward to help him. Now, safe in the company of single malt I ask myself what I could have done to help him and can find no answer. If I approached would those hard hands not turn on to me? I find no shame in my cowardice.

  Schaeffer’s words seemed lost for a moment, they came but they came quiet, as if he were speaking from inside a sealed box. Sullivan raised the Dictaphone to his ear. Something else was there; a growl, a snarl, something…when Schaeffer’s words returned, they were so loud Sullivan almost dropped the Dictaphone.

  …flung upwards above the bed! His body bending back on itself in a huge, impossible arch, and then with one sudden jerk, like he were a wet towel being flicked out by an invisible hand, his body whipped itself straight and tumbled back to the bed like a pile of rags. I have been in my room ever since, afraid to go outside. A foolish coward. I have tried to make contact with the night watch above but no through line is active. I must wait until morning. I have a childish dream that all will be well in the morning. I do not believe in weaponry, my distaste for guns is, I hope, well documented, but I have taken the gun that the Party supplied me with from inside the cabinet. I am disgusted by how it makes me feel safe.

  Click. There was nothing but silence for several minutes. Sullivan wound the tape on and then flipped play. Schaeffer returned.

  I have blood on my hands, both metaphorically and literally. There is a fine line between the unseen and fear and I sit astride it now. As a man of science I watch him in awe,
the things he does, the personalities he seems to create, marvelling and dreaming of what he can do, yet the compassionate man I hoped to be is torn in two by the madness he seems to be enduring and I cannot let this progress. I ask myself about compassion, convince myself that I was ever worthy of that trait and then I see what I am doing here. I strive to create something incredible and whilst I do, I am but merely a butcher. The carnage is a path to cure. That is the line. That is the line I straddle. Last night I fired the gun at the wall in my room and I have no idea why.

  He is now fully removed from the others.

  Click. Fast forward. Play.

  He is awake again. At least something is. I have heard at least five different voices within him. I can hear them calling at me from deep below in the chamber. It would seem even the very bowels of this dreadful building is not a deep enough place for this man. I confess that now, when the bodies are sent down to the chamber, we don’t even look at him. The patients stir each time he awakens as if they sense something. Whilst this recognition in the subjects shows how far we have progressed with the Wash, my joy is tempered by the rage in that corrupted soul’s voice.

  Kendrick has sent someone out here to investigate the disappearance of the workers. He had no interest in my concerns as I suspected he wouldn’t. He does not believe me. He patronises me. Kendrick cares only for the Wash. He is delighted at the progress and chooses to hear nothing else. I hear they are changing leader again so I put his blinkered attitude down to him being too busy with Party affairs to be concerned about our trivial little horrors. The very notion that the Party would choose this place for the country’s rebirth seems too thick an irony to swallow.

  He is a killer. I am sure of it. The watch won’t even come near him now. Even with him sedated and chained they will not breath the same air. We are into the last days of building and that we ever got this far is a miracle. Grennaught watches him like only a policeman can. BH13 is all but gone from within the thing I see. He talks but it is with the tongue of others. Many others. At times I believe I can hear him. There are moments when I recognise his voice but in that time he says only one thing. He speaks only a warning. Grennaught believes he can question him like a normal suspect. I warned him. I warned Kendrick, but neither believed me. They believe the missing have run away, somehow escaping the watch’s rifles up above, to hotfoot it through the snow and into the forest. They say they will search, but they won’t. I wish I could believe them. I hope they have escaped. I hope what I dreamed last night was just a dream.

  A long silence. Sullivan wound the tape on. When the voice returned it was not Schaeffer. Not at first. It was a deep, scratching growl that seemed to come not from the Dictaphone, but from the walls. When Schaeffer finally started talking again he sounded tearful and scared, a horrid resignation weaving through the words he quietly spoke.

  There are things worse than death. In the weeks…maybe even months…I don’t know…time…time seems…I don’t know…since we rid ourselves of him, things have started to fall apart. Something has awoken with the death of BH13. Things are…strange…things I can’t…strange, yes, very strange things. I can still feel him. In my dreams I can hear him. Sometimes I swear he walks through me.

  I am sure that this place is the ultimate answer. This place is the end and the beginning, and what is playing out before me is a bastard of both. I ask myself if I felt it when I arrived. Did I feel it in the house or in the grounds? I believe there was something. There was a force. An energy. An unremitting negativity covering us all like the thickest of shrouds. But the shelter is the heart; it is the rotten core that ties it all together. It is his black heart and he is its vessel. I can feel him talking to me, screaming the pain of those that lay here. We came here to build but all we did was break down doors that had never meant to be opened again. We burrowed into land, which should have lain untouched. BH13 talked of an evil here and if that is such then it is us that must take responsibility for it. It is us that released it. Such lunacy. How do I even say these things? I am not a man of words. I am a man of science. At this time I find my beliefs as stretched as my ability to fully articulate what I have seen. But I have seen. I have felt. He feels for me. At night he tries to get inside my head. I fear that when I dream I somehow grant him permission. In my dreams I keep seeing his face. I am forever reminded of how he looked as we killed him. The look of humour, of release and of knowing. He had been waiting for Greenaught and I to do it. Now I fear he is too powerful to stop. A memory you can’t wash away.

  ‘There’s a lot of it about, it seems, this madness. Seems to be catching. Turn that shit off and get on your feet.’ Kendrick was leaning across the doorway, staring in at Sullivan as though he’d been caught in his wife’s knicker drawer. Plucking the walkie-talkie from his jacket, Kendrick took it to his lips. ‘Maddox? She’s gone walkabout again. Go find her, will you?’

  He stepped into the room and kicked the Dictaphone from Sullivan’s hand, bringing a heel down on to it as it fell to the floor, shattering the frail plastic and booting what snapped off across the room. The pistol was in his right hand, a pointing finger from a clenched fist, ramming his words home.

  ‘I seem to remember asking you to keep an eye on her, Sullivan. I distinctly remember that. Imagine my surprise to find that bedroom empty. Not cutting out on the Party are you?’

  ‘You knew,’ Sullivan said accusingly, looking down at the smashed plastic as if that was all the explanation needed. ‘You knew what went on here. Yet still you led us here.’

  ‘Nothing went on here.’

  ‘Nothing?’

  ‘One guy lost the plot. Went mad. That’s all. It happens.’

  ‘And Mia?’

  ‘As I said, this madness…’

  ‘How many madmen is it going to take?’

  Kendrick crossed the room and perched on the edge of the desk, staring off at the broken bookshelf. As he sat his suit jacket flopped open and Sullivan could see an ugly blood splat down one side of his shirt. Between the two men a small feather gracefully rocked back and forth on the air before resting amongst the papers on the floor.

  ‘What did you do to him?’ Sullivan asked quietly.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You had Grennaught kill him?’

  ‘I didn’t kill anyone!’ Kendrick snapped.

  ‘Of course you didn’t.’

  ‘He was a lunatic. A lag. A man with no point. Much like you.’ Kendrick was beginning to snarl, fighting the corner Sullivan was trying to back him into. ‘He was a killer!’ He picked absently at the cut on his cheek, a thick crusty scab now peeling off under his fingers.

  ‘I’m a killer. Maddox and Turtle too. Shall we all line up against the wall?’

  Kendrick’s lip curled and he bared his teeth in a crazed half-smile. ‘You want to be careful how much you ask, Sullivan. Eventually you might just get an answer. That would put me in a difficult situation.’

  ‘Would it? Why? You’re going to shoot me either way.’

  ‘True.’

  ‘Where’s Mr Davenport?’

  ‘Why do you care?’

  ‘I don’t care.’

  ‘You’ve an awful lot to say for a man who doesn’t care.’

  ‘You’ve blood on you.’

  Kendrick pulled his jacket closed and turned the pistol towards the floor just in front of Sullivan. ‘Don’t you worry about that. Don’t you worry about anything.’

  Sullivan slowly started to stand, the pain in his muscles flaring like a warning as his legs straightened. Before him the pistol followed him up and then Kendrick came too.

  ‘You don’t believe in what we are trying to do here do you, Sullivan? You cling to an outdated, timid notion of right and wrong and think that we blur the line. Good old Sullivan, the man who swore he’d never hold a gun again. The last man with any morality. Am I right?’

  Sullivan shrugged. ‘I don’t give a fuck about you or your Party. You took all that mattered to me.’

  �
��We did?’

  ‘Yeah. You did.’

  ‘However did we do that, old chap?’

  ‘Did she suffer?’

  Again Kendrick’s ugly smile flashed and with it seemed to come a begrudging admiration.

  ‘How’d you know? Who told you?’

  ‘I asked if she suffered.’

  ‘I understand the process can be quite painful. At the start. Once they are drooling and dribbling I guess they don’t feel so much. Or that’s what Schaeffer used to say, though I’d always thought that perhaps it was just that our conscience didn’t feel it. It’s easier if they don’t have…it all there, if you know what I mean. Course you know what I mean. Now I asked you who told you?’

  The knowing did little to assuage the grief or the anger, merely blew at the flame in his heart. The dream was still there, it always had been, but she was no longer within him, it was just the wreckage she had left.

  ‘She did.’

  Kendrick laughed. ‘You poor sad soul.’

  ‘Did she have a choice?’

  ‘Who would willingly volunteer for such a thing? Of course she didn’t. I had to move her out of the way. Having a stranger with such power over the command? No. That could never be allowed. Davenport was getting weak with infatuation, taking his eye off the enemy. When we were overrun…well, it was easy for her to just disappear. It was beneficial to have him think that she had been killed. Guilt can empower a weak man. I don’t think she ever loved him, if its any comfort.’

  Sullivan held a hand to his mouth to steady trembling lips, and then pushed the palm to his forehead, hitting it clean and hard, trying to push new images out.

  ‘We had it, Sullivan. It worked. We were doing great things here. But then of course our esteemed leader convinced people to pull the plug. All that work. All that time and effort. Davenport killed her, really, don’t you see? It was all his fault. His love drove her here and his misguided sense of what is right killed her.’